Various

“ The Roman empire was, and always continued to be, ideally one and indivisible. There were two emperors, but one Empire—two persons, but one power. The point is of great importance for the understanding of the whole of the middle ages: there only is, and can be, one Empire, which may indeed, for convenience, be ruled conjointly by two emperors, resident, again for convenience, in two separate capitals. And, as a matter of fact, not only did the residence of an emperor in the East not spell bifurcation, it actually fostered the tendency towards unification. ”

“ Looking at the opposition between these and the ordinary opinions, we are not surprised that Empedocles notes the limitation and narrowness of human perceptions. We see, he says, but a part, and fancy that we have grasped the whole. But the senses cannot lead to truth; thought and reflection must look at the thing on every side. It is the business of a philosopher, while he lays bare the fundamental difference of elements, to display the identity that subsists between what seem unconnected parts of the universe. ”

“ Probably the doctrine that the divinity (δαίμων) passes from element to element, nowhere finding a home, is a mystical way of teaching the continued identity of the principles which are at the bottom of every phase of development from inorganic nature to man. At the top of the scale are the prophet and the physician, those who have best learned the secret of life; they are next to the divine. One law, an identity of elements, pervades all nature; existence is one from end to end; the plant and the animal are links in a chain where man is a link too ”

“ Source of the Idea of Temperature.—The single new element that thermodynamics introduces into the ordinary dynamical specification of a material system is temperature. This conception is akin to that of potential, except that it is given to us directly by our sense of heat. But if that were not so, we could still demonstrate, on the basis of Carnot’s principle, that there is a definite function of the state of a body which must be the same for all of a series of connected bodies, when thermal equilibrium has become established so that there is no tendency for heat to flow from one to another. ”

“ Yet, as when Rome fell, the Catholic Church survived, and ultimately found for itself a new Empire of the West, so, when Constantinople fell, the Orthodox Church continued its life, and found for itself a new Empire of the East—the Empire of Russia. ”

“ Elijah is the prophet of the wilderness, wandering, rugged and austere; Elisha is the prophet of civilized life, of the city and the court, with the dress, manners and appearance of ordinary “grave citizens.” Elijah is the messenger of vengeance—sudden, fierce and overwhelming; Elisha is the messenger of mercy and restoration. Elijah’s miracles, with few exceptions, are works of wrath and destruction; Elisha’s miracles, with but one notable exception, are works of beneficence and healing. ”

“ No right estimate of her, whether as a woman, an artist or a philosopher, can be formed without a steady recollection of her infinite capacity for mental suffering, and her need of human support. The statement that there is no sex in genius, is on the face of it, absurd. George Sand, certainly the most independent and dazzling of all women authors, neither felt, nor wrote, nor thought as a man. Saint Teresa, another great writer on a totally different plane, was pre-eminently feminine in every word and idea. ”

“ It was an empire resting neither on the sword nor on the ballot-box, but on two great ideas, taught by the clergy and received by the laity, that all believers in Christ form one body politic, and that the one model and type for the organization of that body is to be found in the past of Rome. It was indeed the weakness of the Empire that its roots were only the thoughts of men ”

“ No other political conception—no conception of a πόλις or of a nation—was any longer possible. When the Church gained its hold of the Roman world, the Empire, as it has been well said, was already “not only a government, but a fashion of conceiving the world”: it had stood for three centuries, and no man could think of any other form of political association. Moreover, the gospel of St Paul—that there is one Church, whereof Christ is the Head, and we are all members—could not but reinforce for the Christian the conception of a necessary political unity of all the world under a single head. ”

“ It had been shown from the kinetic theory by Maxwell that in a gas-column the mean kinetic energy of the molecules is the same at all heights. If the only test of equality of temperature consisted in bringing the bodies into contact, this would be rather a proof that thermal temperature is of the same physical nature in all parts of the field of force; but temperature can also be equalized across a distance by radiation, so that this law for gases is itself already necessitated by Carnot’s general principle, and merely confirmed or verified by the special gas-theory. ”

“ Yet, on the other hand, it was the strength and glory of the Empire that it lived, all through the middle ages, an unconquerable idea of the mind of man. Because it was a being of their thought, it stirred men to reflection: the Empire, particularly in its clash with the Papacy, produced a political consciousness and a political speculation reflected for us in the many libelli de lite imperatorum et pontificum, and in the pages of Dante and Marsilius of Padua. ”

“ Hence when a body is charged positively its potential is raised above that of the earth, and when negatively it is lowered beneath that of the earth. Potential in a certain sense is to electricity as difference of level is to liquids or difference of temperature to heat. It must be noted, however, that potential is a mere mathematical concept, and has no objective existence like difference of level, nor is it capable per se of producing physical changes in bodies, such as those which are brought about by rise of temperature, apart from any question of difference of temperature. ”

“ It might thus be concluded that embryology would exclude the study of larvae, in which the whole or the greater part of the development takes place outside the parent and outside the egg. But this is not the case; embryology includes not only a study of embryos as just defined, but also a study of larvae. In this way the scope of the subject is still further widened. As long as embryology confines its attention to embryos, it is easy to fix its limits, at any rate in the higher animals. ”

“ Considered in the most general way, we may define matter as a complex of gravitational, kinetic and chemical energies, which are found to cling together in the same space. Of these energies the capacity factors, namely, weight, mass and elements, are conservative as described, while the intensity factors, potential, velocity and affinity, may change in wide limits. To explain why we find these energies constantly combined one with another, we only have to think of a mass without gravity or a ponderable body without mass. ”

“ But experience has taught us that lead and gold are chemical elements in the modern sense, and that there is a general experimental law that elements are not transformable one into another. So experience taught the alchemists irresistibly that in spite of the manifoldness of chemical changes it is not always possible to change any given substance into another; the possibilities are much more limited, and there is only a certain range of substances to be obtained from a given one. ”

“ The conception of work and of energy was originally derived from observation of purely mechanical phenomena, that is to say, phenomena in which the relative positions and motions of visible portions of matter were all that were taken into consideration. Hence it is not surprising that, in those more subtle forms in which energy cannot be readily or completely converted into work, the universality of the principle of energy, its conservation, as regards amount, should for a long while have escaped recognition after it had become familiar in pure dynamics. ”

“ Emerson was a sweet-tempered Carlyle, living in the sunshine. Carlyle was a militant Emerson, moving amid thunderclouds. The things that each most admired in the other were self-reliance, directness, moral courage. A passage in Emerson’s Diary, written on his homeward voyage, strikes the keynote of his remaining life. “A man contains all that is needful to his government within himself.... All real good or evil that can befall him must be from himself.... There is a correspondence between the human soul and everything that exists in the world; more properly, everything that is known to man. ”

“ It does not depend on difference in work, if the work each is doing is part of one larger operation; all the servants of a railway company, whether employed on the trains, or at the stations, or on the line, are in a common employment. It does not necessarily depend on difference of locality; a servant who packs goods at the factory and a servant who unpacks them in the shop may well be in a common employment. On the other hand, it is not enough that the two servants are working for the same employer, if there is nothing in common between them except that they are making money for the same man ”

“ Elizabeth was terribly handicapped by having no heirs of her body and no obvious English successor. She could not afford to recognize Mary’s claim, for that would have been to alienate the Protestants, double the number of Catholics, and, in her own phrase, to spread a winding-sheet before her eyes; for all would have turned to the rising sun. Mary was dangerous enough as it was, and no one would willingly make his rival his heir. Elizabeth could hardly be expected to go out of her way and ask parliament to repeal its own acts for Mary’s sake ”

“ The Mahommedan puppet of the English, Shah Shuja, had been asked, when ruler of Afghanistan, to restore them to India; and what he had failed to do the Christian ruler of opposing Mahommedans and Hindus resolved to effect in the most solemn and public manner. In vain had Major (afterwards Sir Henry) Rawlinson proved that they were only reproductions of the original gates, to which the Ghazni moulvies clung merely as a source of offerings from the faithful who visited the old conqueror’s tomb. In vain did the Hindu sepoys show the most chilling indifference to the belauded restoration. ”

“ To sum up, the development of nerves is not, as has been recently urged, an outgrowth of cell processes from certain cells, but is a differentiation of a substance which was already in position, and from which all other organs of the body have been and are developed. It frequently happens that the young nerve tracts can be seen sooner near the central organ than elsewhere, but it is doubtful if any importance can be attached to this fact, since it is not constantly observed. ”

“ Though controlling all phenomena of which we have any experience, the principle of the dissipation of energy rests on a very different foundation from that of the conservation of energy; for while we may conceive of no means of circumventing the latter principle, it seems that the actions of intelligent beings are subject to the former only in consequence of the rudeness of the machinery which they have at their disposal for controlling the behaviour of those ultimate portions of matter, in virtue of the motions or positions of which the energy with which they have to deal exists. ”

“ There are, according to Empedocles, four ultimate elements, four primal divinities, of which are made all structures in the world—fire, air, water, earth. These four elements are eternally brought into union, and eternally parted from each other, by two divine beings or powers, love and hatred—an attractive and a repulsive force which the ordinary eye can see working amongst men, but which really pervade the whole world. ”

“ To say that the development of the organism and of its component parts is a progress from the simple to the complex is to state a truism, but to state that it is also a progress from the general to the special is to go altogether beyond the facts. The bipinnaria larva of an echinoderm, the trochosphere larva of an annelid, the blastodermic vesicle of a mammal are all as highly specialized as their respective adults, but the specialization is for a different purpose, and of a different kind to that which characterizes the adult. ”

“ As man, animal and plant are composed of the same elements in different proportions, there is an identity of nature in them all. They all have sense and understanding; in man, however, and especially in the blood at his heart, mind has its peculiar seat. But mind is always dependent upon the body, and varies with its changing constitution. Hence the precepts of morality are with Empedocles largely dietetic.
Knowledge is explained by the principle that the several elements in the things outside us are perceived by the corresponding elements in ourselves. ”

“ Though we can convert the whole of the energy possessed by any mechanical system into heat, it is not in our power to perform the inverse operation, and to utilize the whole of the heat in doing mechanical work. Thus we see that different forms of energy are not equally valuable for conversion into work. The ratio of the portion of the energy of a system which can under given conditions be converted into mechanical work to the whole amount of energy operated upon may be called the “availability” of the energy. ”

“ It is clear, both from their origin and history, that the layers or masses of cells called ectoderm, endoderm and mesoderm have not the same value in different animals; indeed, it is misleading to speak of three layers. At the most we can only speak of two, for the mesoderm is formed after the others, has a composite origin, and has no more claim to be considered an embryonic layer than has the rudiment of the central nervous system, which in some animals, indeed, appears as soon as the mesoderm. ”

“ Hence when useful work can be obtained from a system by simply connecting visible portions of it by a train of mechanism, such energy is more readily recognized than is that which would compel us to control the behaviour of molecules before we could transform it into useful work. This leads up to the fundamental distinction, introduced by Lord Kelvin, between “available energy,” which we can turn to mechanical effect, and “diffuse energy,” which is useless for that purpose. ”

“ In physical science, the chemical elements may be compared with such concepts as mass, momentum, quantity of electricity, entropy and such like. While mass and entropy are determined univocally by a unit and a number, quantity of electricity has a unit, a number and a sign, for it can be positive as well as negative. Momentum has a unit, a number and a direction in space. Elements do not have a common unit as the former magnitudes, but every element has its own unit, and there is no transition from one to another. ”

“ The pope borrowed his title of pontifex maximus from the emperor: what is far more, he made himself gradually, and in the course of centuries, the Caesar and Imperator of the Church. The offices and the dioceses of the Church are parallel to the offices and dioceses of the Diocletian empire: the whole spirit of orderly hierarchy and regular organization, which breathes in the Roman Church, is the heritage of ancient Rome. ”

“ The science of embryology, then, is the science of individual development, and includes within its purview all those changes of form and structure, whether embryonic, larval or post-larval, which characterize the life of the individual. The beginning of this period is precise and definite—it is the completion of the fertilization of the ovum, in which the life of the individual has its start. ”

“ If it can be shown that, however the duration and all other conditions of the experiment may be varied, the same amount of heat can in the end be always produced when the same amount of energy is expended, then, and only then, can we infer that heat is a form of energy, and that the energy consumed has been really transformed into heat. This was left for J.P. Joule to achieve; his experiments conclusively prove that heat and energy are of the same nature, and that all other forms of energy can be transformed into an equivalent amount of heat. ”

“ How do the different organs of the partly developed embryo stand with regard to their future fate? What are the stimuli (Reize) effecting differentiation? What is to be said about the specific character of the different formative effects? And as the most important question of all: Are all the problems offered to us in the physiology of development to be solved with the aid of the laws known hitherto in science, or do we want specifically new “vitalistic” factors?
Energy in different forms is required for development, and is provided by the surrounding medium. ”

“ When work is done against these forces no full equivalent of potential energy may be produced; this applies especially to frictional forces, for if the motion of the system be reversed the forces will be also reversed and will still oppose the motion. It was long believed that work done against such forces was lost, and it was not till the 19th century that the energy thus transformed was traced; the conservation of energy has become the master-key to unlock the connexions in inanimate nature. ”

“ None the less it is easy to find it in embryo in the speculations of the essentially European philosophers of Greece. Plato, whose philosophy was strongly opposed to the evolution theory, distinctly inclines to the emanation idea in his doctrine that each particular thing is what it is in virtue of a pre-existent idea, and that the particulars are the lowest in the scale of existence, at the head of, or above, which is the idea of the good. ”

“ These enclosing surfaces, therefore, cut up the space into shells of potential, and divide up the tubes of force into electric cells. The surface of a charged conductor is an equipotential surface, because when the electric charge is in equilibrium there is no tendency for electricity to move from one part to the other.
We arbitrarily call the potential of the earth zero, since all potential difference is relative and there is no absolute potential any more than absolute level. We call the difference of potential between a charged conductor and the earth the potential of the conductor. ”